This looks interesting and fun project for the author. They get to play with some tools they know and like, like AWS and Nomad, and some new ones, like Mastodon.
That said, looking at requirements, and also being involved in fediverse for a few years, I would say that this looks expensive, complex and inefficient. Mastodon the software itself (not the fediverse, what people often confuse mastodon with) doesn’t look like it’s made for self-hosters.
That’s from the point of view of someone who simply wants a somewhat controlled social presence and doesn’t want to play with any of that any more and just want to run their fediverse service.
Just the price itself for this setup is already crazy. You could just rent a masto.host instance for like 6$ a month and for 45 you get a “community”-sized instance with elastic search enabled. I know that was not the point, they want to self-host, and play with the tools. But I am pointing out it’s a very inefficient setup. Getting all those services individually, paying for them, I would like to see the cost breakdown of what the author pays between the database, storage, and ec2 instances (and whatever else).
Personally I went with the simplest route I could find. I used gotosocial - it’s mostly compatible with mastodon’s servers, for a single user the sqlite database is functioning great, the media storage is just an extra attached volume. I already had a 2vCPU/4GB vps that I use for other things, so I just spun up a docker container with a few-line-patch on top of the last release tag. The extra 20GB volume costs me about 1€, and even if I didnät host other things there, the VPS (sorry, “cloud server”) costs like 5,70€ or so a month.
And I still “own my social media presence”, “use the tools I know” etc.
But as said, it’s most likely not the point at all, the point is to play with this tech, and it seems to make the author pretty happy.
Thanks for the comment - I totally agree there are cheaper and more efficient ways to do this, if that’s more important to you.
You reminded me I forgot to link to masto.host as a cheaper alternative, I’ll add that later today. They were closed for signups for a while but looks like they’re open again, hopefully they got a whole bunch of new business this last few months.
This looks interesting and fun project for the author. They get to play with some tools they know and like, like AWS and Nomad, and some new ones, like Mastodon.
That said, looking at requirements, and also being involved in fediverse for a few years, I would say that this looks expensive, complex and inefficient. Mastodon the software itself (not the fediverse, what people often confuse mastodon with) doesn’t look like it’s made for self-hosters.
That’s from the point of view of someone who simply wants a somewhat controlled social presence and doesn’t want to play with any of that any more and just want to run their fediverse service.
Just the price itself for this setup is already crazy. You could just rent a masto.host instance for like 6$ a month and for 45 you get a “community”-sized instance with elastic search enabled. I know that was not the point, they want to self-host, and play with the tools. But I am pointing out it’s a very inefficient setup. Getting all those services individually, paying for them, I would like to see the cost breakdown of what the author pays between the database, storage, and ec2 instances (and whatever else).
Personally I went with the simplest route I could find. I used gotosocial - it’s mostly compatible with mastodon’s servers, for a single user the sqlite database is functioning great, the media storage is just an extra attached volume. I already had a 2vCPU/4GB vps that I use for other things, so I just spun up a docker container with a few-line-patch on top of the last release tag. The extra 20GB volume costs me about 1€, and even if I didnät host other things there, the VPS (sorry, “cloud server”) costs like 5,70€ or so a month.
And I still “own my social media presence”, “use the tools I know” etc.
But as said, it’s most likely not the point at all, the point is to play with this tech, and it seems to make the author pretty happy.
Thanks for the comment - I totally agree there are cheaper and more efficient ways to do this, if that’s more important to you.
You reminded me I forgot to link to masto.host as a cheaper alternative, I’ll add that later today. They were closed for signups for a while but looks like they’re open again, hopefully they got a whole bunch of new business this last few months.